This cheesecake, y’all

December 1, 2015

Seriously. You need a go-to cheesecake recipe in your life. This is it. This is purely and simply the best cheesecake recipe I have ever made in my life, and I’ve made a lot of ’em.

This recipe, which is credited online to one Janet Spaulding, and my hat is off to her, has been reprinted in Southern Living and on a host of recipe websites. It makes a New York style cheesecake — heavy, creamy, rich. A nine-inch springform pan yields 12 generous serving-size slices. And be advised it will make enough batter to fill your nine-inch springform pan to the very top; you may wish to cut it back by a 8 oz of cream cheese and sour cream and an egg, or have a graham cracker pie crust ready to hold the overflow.

Cheesecake No. 2: Nutella pecan with sea salted caramel

To-wit:

2 cups graham cracker crumbs

1/2 cup butter, melted

2 tablespoons sugar

4 (8-ounce) packages cream cheese, softened

1 3/4 cups sugar

7 large eggs

3 (8-ounce) containers sour cream

1 tablespoon vanilla

It’s pretty straightforward. Make the crust with the first three ingredients, and press it into your pan. Soften the cream cheese; whip it in your stand mixer until it’s smooth. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating after each. Add the sugar. Add the sour cream and vanilla. Pour it into the pan, and bake at 300 degrees for an hour and 25 minutes. Turn off the oven; DO NOT open the door, but leave the cake in the oven for four hours. Then take it out, cool completely, top as desired, and refrigerate. Handily, it tends to rise, and then fall, a bit in the springform, leaving a higher rim around the outside, which lends itself nicely to filling.

What’s so fun about this cheesecake is that it lends itself so easily to all sorts of adaptations and variations. For instance, I cut back on the cream cheese and sour cream and eggs, and then added two cups of white chocolate chips, melted with a third of a cup of half and half.

Not certain if it was the chocolate or the cream, but this is the first time I have baked this cheesecake that it did not crack. I think I’ll take to adding a quarter-cup of half and half to the batter and see if that works on a regular basis.

One cheesecake got topped with plain old cherry pie filling from a can. It’s just hard to beat that stuff. On the other, the one that went in the pie crust, I got creative.

I spread the top with a thin layer of Nutella, also known as crack-in-a-jar. Over that, I put toasted pecans. Over the pecans, I drizzled caramel sauce. And over the caramel sauce, I sprinkled a bit of sea salt. It’s a pretty thing, and I put it in the freezer, as we cut neither of these babies for Thanksgiving dinner.

In point of fact, only a quarter of the cherry one has been eaten, so I guess on today’s agenda is to freeze the bulk of that, as well.

So if you ‘n y’mama ‘n ’em feel the need of a piece of cheesecake, stop on by.